Accomodating Obsolete Browsers -- How2?

[John McGaw]

http://johnmcgaw.com/testsite/index.html .

FYI, NS4 is not the only issue with this page. Take a look with any
gecko browser at an enlarged text size. At least only the home
page shows this particular problem.


You're welcome.

You are right of course. Increasing text size radically does, shall we say,
alter the appearance of the index.html page. At least more than the other
~130 pages. I'm trying to find some other sort of layout that appeals to me
so that the boxes won't jump around the way they do. Going up a size or two
on the browsers I've tried doesn't cause much problem but eventually
something has to give. I had an overall layout for that page about a year
back that probably wouldn't be much of a problem to implement but it is even
less attractive than the current one.
--
John McGaw
[Knoxville, TN, USA]

Return address will not work. Please
reply in group or through my website:
http://johnmcgaw.com

 

[Bob]

http://johnmcgaw.com/testsite/index.html .

John:

You're between a rock and a hard place with any web site. Your choices
are:

1. leave it the way it is and just leave the NN4 users in "fallback
mode" (Unacceptable to many of us).

2. redo the site with the limited CSS features that NN4 supports
(not much) and/or use alternate style files as suggested earlier.

3. redo the site with table based layout (shock, horror, recant Bob!)
and only use CSS for the features that are supported by IE4+ and NN4+
such as CSS formatting - but not CSS positioning.

The sad and somewhat obvious truth is that if you use the
latest technology, it will not be supported in browsers written
before the technology was adopted. (In the case of NN4, even some
of the technology it allegedly supports has issues).

 

[Davmagic .Com]

From: (e-mail address removed)
(Bob)

3. redo the site with table based layout
(shock, horror, recant Bob!) and only use
CSS for the features that are supported by
IE4+ and NN4+ such as CSS formatting -
but not CSS positioning.
The sad and somewhat obvious truth is
that if you use the latest technology, it will
not be supported in browsers written
before the technology was adopted. (In
the case of NN4, even some of the
technology it allegedly supports has
issues).

Ain't it the truth! Consider over 1.5 million MSNTV users who cannot
view your pages written as they are... (and probably never will
considering MS's money practices)...

Scrap the CSS-P and go with conventional tables for layout if you REALLY
want everyone to enjoy all your excellent content (I viewed it on my PC
too, looks fine on IE6+)...

Web Design-Magic-Painting-Junking-Games
INFO 2000 For You
http://www.davmagic.com
See how your webpages look on a MSN-TV Browser:
Download it here: http://developer.msntv.com/Tools/msntvvwr.asp

 

[Toby A Inkster]

The sad and somewhat obvious truth is that if you use the
latest technology, it will not be supported in browsers written
before the technology was adopted.

As I have said before... most W3C technologies are written with a degree
of backwards-compatibility in mind.

My XHTML 1.1 + CSS 2 pages although designed primarily for modern browsers
such as Mozilla and Opera are perfectly usable in pretty much any browser
that's out there.

Sure there may be one or two pages that cause problems, and the CSS styles
obviously won't work in pre-CSS browsers, but my CSS positioning works
fine in Konqueror 3, Safari 1, Netscape 6 upwards, Internet Explorer 4
upwards and (I'm quite proud of this next bit) Opera 3.62 upwards.

The content and navigation are usable in every other browser I've tried
(except Mosaic 0.6 beta that seems to segfault, but I think that may be a
problem with my installation) including Mosaic from 1.0, Opera from
2.x, Netscape from 1.x, Internet Explorer 2, UdiWWW, Cello 1.01a, Magic
Dave's precious WebTV Viewer 2.8 and so on and so forth.

Structural, semantic HTML + CSS makes it *easy* to write a site that can
display everywhere.

 

[Spartanicus]

My XHTML 1.1 + CSS 2 pages although designed primarily for modern browsers
such as Mozilla and Opera are perfectly usable in pretty much any browser
that's out there.

Then you are fooling yourself, xhtml 1.1 should not be served with a
text/html mime type.

 

[Toby A Inkster]

Then you are fooling yourself, xhtml 1.1 should not be served with a
text/html mime type.

The W3C recommendation is that XHTML 1.1 SHOULD (note: not MUST) be served
as application/xhtml+xml -- and for good browsers it is.

However, my pages use an HTML-like subset of XHTML 1.1 so I see no problem
in serving as "text/html" for browsers that require it -- certainly my
XHTML pages are closer to valid HTML than most documents served with type
text/html that you'd find around the web!

 

[pragma]

The W3C recommendation is that XHTML 1.1 SHOULD (note: not MUST) be served
as application/xhtml+xml -- and for good browsers it is.

They also say that XHTML 1.1 SHOULD NOT (note: not MAY) be served as
text/html so you are indeed fooling yourself, you 1337 h4x0r you.

http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml-media-types/#summary

Your markup is just plain old fashioned HTML 4, that's what every
web browser loading it thinks. You know this deep down

Since so few browsers can handle genuine XHTML reliably it's going to
be many years before you use it.

 

[Toby A Inkster]

Your markup is just plain old fashioned HTML 4, that's what every
web browser loading it thinks.

Only some browsers will think it's "plain old fashioned HTML 4".

Any good browser will do one of the following:

* Send an appropriate Accept header and receive an appropriate
Content-Type header; or

* Actually pay proper attention to the DTD.

Some other browsers may think it's HTML, but that's not my fault -- even
without the HTTP headers I do explicitly say that it's XHTML three times
per page: the DTD, the Content-Type <meta> tag and the XML namespace.

 

[Bob]

My XHTML 1.1 + CSS 2 pages although designed primarily for modern browsers
such as Mozilla and Opera are perfectly usable in pretty much any browser
that's out there.

No offense, but I'd term your site "bland". If I presented it to
a customer they'd tell me to revise it and review the contract to
make sure they can get out of it if I didn't give them something
better next time. If I showed them the display in NN4 they'd
reel in shock and horror and start reviewing their contract to
see how they can get out of it and how to get their money back.

You site, like the W3C site and other academic sites, is fine for
non-commercial work. It won't cut it in the commercial world.

 

[Toby A Inkster]

No offense, but I'd term your site "bland".

Judging by the looks of my log files you only viewed it using the default
style sheet -- I provide several different alternative styles so that you
can choose one you like best from the drop-down list.

The default style is a little bland, but it's meant to be to an extent.
It's designed to be very neutral, very clear and very cross-browser
compatible, and IMHO achieves these very well.

One of my current favourite styles is the "Fixed Modern" style, although
it suffers a bit from being fixed width (776px).

That said, I publicly admit to not having the best eye for visual design
-- I am far more focused on the back-end. Most large projects I've done,
I've have had separate people doing visual design and copy.

 

[Bob]

* Send an appropriate Accept header and receive an appropriate
Content-Type header; or

Most ending the stream with */*

* Actually pay proper attention to the DTD.
Some other browsers may think it's HTML, but that's not my fault

No, but unfortunately it's yours to deal with.

-- even
without the HTTP headers I do explicitly say that it's XHTML three times
per page: the DTD, the Content-Type <meta> tag and the XML namespace.

I can't say you didn't try

 

[Toby A Inkster]

No, but unfortunately it's yours to deal with.

And I am happy enough to deal with it. The XHTML is written in such a way
that it is compatible with nearly all HTML user agents.